Norman Fischer

An Interview with Susan M. Schultz

NF: First, full disclosure: you and I are poetry pals, and have been for some time. We read each other’s work, see each other once in a while (though we live far apart). We know each other’s families. You have been to a Buddhist retreat with me a time or two. You have published my work. But it occurs to me we have assumed a lot of commonality in view about our work though we have not necessarily discussed that in detail. So I am eager tohave this written exchange.

I would like to focus on your book, Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series. But as, perhaps, a way into the discussion let’s start, if you will, with your critical book, A Poetics of Impasse in Modernand Contemporary American Poetry, specifically, with your notion of silence and its relation to writing. Your thesis is complicated but let’s take just one line, from the opening chapter (which is an essay in poetry) “Introducing Impasse:” “.... one comes into knowledge through silence rather than / Speech.” In the context of the book, silence seems to refer to the inability to write, the interruption of language, which you discuss variously in various writers. But my question is broader perhaps. What about silence? How does it bring us to knowledge? How does it influence, in a positive sense (if it does) writing? Or, another way to put it, what place does silence hold in your own writing?

SMS: I think the thesis was complicated because when I started the book, I was fascinated by poets who stopped writing, either long or short term; by the end, I was more interested in the wider field of what happened post-9/11, when it seemed so difficult to write anything except in (as I then noticed some poets doing) a diaristic form. Without knowing quite how to do it, I was juggling two very different kinds of silences. The first is “silencing”: what happens to minority writers, or women writers. What has happened historically to native Hawaiians and others when the American empire settled in. The second is more a chosen silence, one that opens us up, rather than closing us down. Opening up depends on attention, observation in the moment. Crisis takes us down to the most basic kinds of observation, the “indelible in the hippocampus” image or sound, as Christine Blasey Ford put it recently. The two book projects on my mother chronicled her loss of speech over the course of several years of her dementia. Her silence made me oddly very talkative in that project, as if I were remembering for her, or for myself fearing the loss of memory. At the same time, I found that writing about her required me to get out of the way. I wanted to show her and her colleagues in the Alzheimer’s home, not point to me looking at them and feeling emotions of loss anger and grief. I needed to silence myself in order to allow their voices in. (Of course this is a fiction, since I was writing rather incessantly at the time and, as a man in an orange football jersey in Boise once told me, “oh, you’re in there, all right!”) I was also coming to realize that my once fractious relationship with my mother had come down to mutual silences, more peaceful than before. Insofar as her death was a long and slow crisis, the diaristic form worked for me, as it has in the memory cards, which all belong to a particular date in time.

If the middle of my life seemed full of noise, including the writing of an academic book(!) toward outward goals of promotion and status of a kind, then the near and the far ends have been more involved with silences. As a young person, I suffered from untreated major depression and anxiety disorder. These experiences caused me to look toward mystical writings to understand the way suffering draws the sufferer out of the moment and into (life-saving) meaning. I read a lot of Meister Eckhardt and Julian of Norwich and other mystics and located some consolation there, if not real medication, which I found otherwise. In recent years, I’ve been returning to them and to Buddhist texts, as to meditation, but not because I feel flung out of myself, rather, the act of attending to the world, which seems to increase with age, has made me see that moments, images, conversations, coincidences, all are complete in themselves but also part of a larger field in which everything relates intimately to everything else. The memory cards, which now start from quotations from poets or spiritual writers, attempt to navigate the ravine between daily events (personal and political) and a spiritual life. That life is wrapped in silences. Where my early silences were evasions, many of them, the later ones feel more direct, more connected to the world. The silences in the writing happen between the sentences, between the memory cards, but I think of them now as helpful silences, both to me as I write them and the reader (I hope) as they wing away.

And yes, we’re pals, and I’m grateful to you for your poetry and your wisdom. I’m less grateful for your being a Giants fan . . .

NF: Well, fortunately or unfortunately, the Giants are no longer a factor, and probably will not be, for some time. So we can be more relaxed about that... getting now to your book Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series, I have a lot to ask about. It is an exciting text. For one thing, it sent me to Traherne, who is a fabulous writer. I am of course always interested in writers who engage the religious sense of things in their work, and Traherne is steeped in this. You chose him for a reason. (The others whom you’ve chosen in other Memory Card books — Dogen, Simone Weil— are also religious writers). So the question is, how do you see your improvisations in light of the lines you choose from Traherne?

Your words are not religious meditations, or are they? It seems you are doing all kinds of things, sometimes reportage of what you are seeing or thinking on the day you are writing, sometimes meandering speculation, sometimes getting lost in words’ weeds. So, first, why choose religious writers as your take off point, and second, what is your theory or theme ( if you have one) for these particular improvisations?

SMS: This may go back to silences: poems, like the world, tend to get very noisy. My work of the last couple of decades has been diaristic, in that I write on particular days, engaging events of the day, and then meander into public and private memory. I remember being surprised to note that Adrienne Rich dated her poems, but then it began to make sense. Poems are histories, too. But they can get stuck there, in material time. The spiritual texts that I write from tend more toward abstraction, toward time outside our daily time. They allow me to move between statement and example, but even more, between one kind of meaning and another. I was listening to a podcast of yours about Dogen the other day and heard you refer to the path and the destination as being one and the same thing. But we mark them as separate: the path takes time, and the destination ends a particular history. But to move both ways at once is what I want to do with these memory cards. My most recent sequence is called “I want to write an honest sentence.” Every section begins with that sentence. It’s a more desperate rhetoric than that of Traherne and Dogen, for sure. The new poems are more about honesty than truth. (Gotta start somewhere.) Weil is more the model there, considering her dual interest in politics and spirit.

Somewhere I want to mention that the prose meditation has long been one of my favorite forms of writing. The meditation moves from self to experience to society to spirituality and then back again. Meditation is also what Buddhists do, attending to thoughts and their release, arriving at an approximate silence. I was reading a short tract on silence, which claimed that silence is now something you have to pay for. In order to get away from city noises, airplane noises, the noises of bulldozers, you need to travel into a forest, and that takes money. And often even then, the bulldozer has arrived first. So the prose meditation, and the way it replicates the movement of the mind in zen meditation, reaches for moments away from noise. Of course it may take a long sabbatical to get there, and that is an amazing privilege in many ways.

I got to Traherne by way of John Ashbery. I wrote an essay on Three Poems back in the 90s. While working on it, I read that Ashbery’s therapist, at the time he was writing that book, suggested that he read Traherne’s Meditations. Years later, when I wanted to start from spiritual texts, I chose to start from each of his 100 meditations and do my own. Some days, Tom and I dovetailed, though it got harder as his meditations grew more obsessed with the body and blood of Christ. Then again, my time with his work included the murders of nine African American parishioners in a Charleston church. Matters of the spirit can be bloody, too, and all too present.

NF: since you mention that, I will quote it here for our readers. Also, it clarifies what we are talking about: “For many of the last 15 years, I’ve been writing my own ‘anti-psychological’ memoir, Memory Cards. During much of that time, the poems have been nearly as obsessed with fact as with anywhere fact might lead. Fact can be an unkind and unforgiving muse, as it tends to pull short of truth. I have come to want, not what Joe Harrington calls the “the forced optimism of American culture,” but a realm more spiritual than factual. Whereas I was happy with meaning early in the project (historical, cultural, simply narrative), I’m now looking to see beyond fact, or into it with some clarity.”

So, if I am understanding you, it seems like the virtue of using Traherne and the other “spiritual” writers you have used for the Memory Cards is to get you deeper into, or maybe beyond (which might amount to the same thing!) facts, while using facts to do that. Am I right that previous to your Memory Cards phase you had been more wrapped up with facts per se, in a kind of documentary-poetry kind of way? And so now, continuing with that (and, as we have said, MC does have lots of fact language) you use the texts you quote to push off of? For me this answers a question I was about to ask you next, referring to a specific line in MC 10 that reads, “I’ll trade you content for meaning any day.” So this is the alchemy, turning content into meaning. Anyway, I think this is a lovely theory about the move your work has been making over the last fifteen years. How does it strike you?

SMS: Ah, that particular poem—and its “trade”--had deep baseball content. But I’m not sure I entirely agree with myself in what you quote; I’ve always been obsessed with “meaning” more than fact, though in my Dementia Blog books and in some of the memory cards, there is a lot of fact that is important as fact. I guess my definition of “meaning” has changed, too. So that “meaning” isn’t an intellectual construction, as it might have been for me when I was younger, but a more spiritual one. Thrust out of its inertia, the detail becomes luminous. That takes us back to silences. This re-cognition has made my life as a professional intellectual more difficult recently!

NF: In what way?

SMS: I’m not sure I trust my words to express my doubts well enough here. Perhaps it’s late career cynicism, as I’m caught up in an institution (we call it “the academy”) and a profession (we call it “the profession”) that are in the process of falling apart, along with everything else. Perhaps it’s my greater sense of doubt over the power of the intellect to get us past the rules and plots of its own games. I remember attending a small conference in which scholars talked about Marina Abramovic’s work. I thought her performance of sitting across a table from strangers (mostly) and sharing an intimate gaze with them to be profound. But the discussion didn’t get there; it circled around her career, around who managed to sit across from her, got pretty cynical in places. Perhaps those moments of silent connection are more for poets than for scholars to think about, but I’m not sure why that would be the case. We can’t talk our way out of the fix we’re in, no matter how smart we are, how much we hold to materialism. Maybe we could talk about that!

Did I know less when I suffered the aphasia of major depression? Certainly I couldn’t express my ideas then. But what is “idea” in a time of personal or public crisis? Is it vault or anchor or both? (The answer is both, as we need public policies to make our communities work.) My teaching practice has moved, over the last many years, from one of sharing knowledge (what are the rules of the poem?) to an interest in wisdom (how do these rules relate to our life and death rituals?). The practice of meditation seems to me one of locating wisdom in what you referred to as silence, rather than in the noisy discourse of intellectuals (or sports fans or realtors). The practice of meditation in writing also seems one of shedding intellectual noise in favor of a rest (musical or bed-). At the same time, it’s a record of how we got there, and that still strikes me as important. The archives we create to preserve history are valuable, even if history is not the sum total of who we are or what matters (whether or not there’s “matter” there).

NF: Susan, could you give us a close reading of MC 19, in which you take Traherne to task for his spiritual facility: “That’s too easy, Tom.” The passage you are quoting (I looked it up in the Centuries) refers to Traherne’s enthusiastic description of the vastness of God, and therefore of the soul. Out of this world. Can you write something about your response to this idea, as evidenced specifically in the prose poem?

SMS: That’s tough, as I don’t remember exactly what I was referring to. But here’s my best attempt: The first line of Centuries 19 goes like this: “You never know yourself till you know more than your body.” So his meditation is about having a body, and then leaving it and moving into a spiritual space. My meditation was written at the beginning of January 2015, in the wake of a terror attack in Paris (my #18 is about people trapped in a Kosher market in Paris during the attack, where, as I recall, a Muslim clerk protected customers). Terror is all about the violent destruction of bodies. While Traherne is sometimes obsessed with the body and blood of Christ (I take him to task for that, too, later on), this meditation of his felt—in context—as if it moved too quickly from body to spirit. What do we do in such a violent age? How do we talk about bodies as containers for spirit, when they can so easily be blown to bits? How is the detail “luminous,” if it’s a shard of flesh? I just don’t know.

NF: Yes I know what you mean. Recently I was reading Emerson’s great essay “Nature” in which he says the soul, who we really are, is beyond nature, while the body, along with trees and lakes etc (as well as human material productions, like cities) is nature. So yes this literally Transcendental take on spirituality, in which the flesh is corrupt and expendable, but the spirit is real, seems no longer possible, even maybe a monstrous bypass, as if if we can think of heaven long enough we can forget about the horrors of earth. On the other hand— and here is the key, for me anyway— if we are stuck with the body, the flesh, the material world, and that only, as a reduced and vulnerable category, then we are pretty much doomed to despair. Hard to pay attention to what is going on (and we haven’t even mentioned climate change and its long range effects!) without losing it altogether. So we do need at least a jot of transcendence to keep us going. How to put these together though, that’s the trick. Maybe the key has something to do with what you said in your last answer, about the detail becoming luminous. And then after that your questioning whether a body blown to bits can be luminous. Yes, how do we write about this stuff? How do you? This seems to be a particular challenge for poetry now. [Actually though you do a gorgeous job of it in 95, written in response to that horrible shooting of nine black church folks in Charleston in June of 2015. I want to quote some of it here: “... the nine of them in their sanctuary, contained in your lord’s presence, their blood soaking the floor, soaking the city’s streets, soaking our televisions, soaking our souls— if we still have them.Was he with the empty stare the agent of your story, Tom? That hateful lost fuck-up of a boy? Is he our Judas? Really, Tom? Must we love him too?”]

SMS: I drive through Honolulu many days and realize how much of the city will be under water in a couple decades, yes. Climate change is as real as the tons and tons of plastic that wash up on the southernmost point of the Big Island. So how do we write about this? There seem to be many ways to do it: by archiving the plastic; by archiving the language used to defend fossil fuels in the name of a “good economy”; by writing histories of our trash and our cancers. By creating local resistances to capitalism and supporting indigenous ones. But I agree with you, Norman, that while we need to face (down?) the climate crisis, the Alzheimer’s crisis, the political crises, we also need “at least a jot of transcendence.” To “jot” is to write, to note down, to observe the luminous—or at least odd and surprising—detail. As a job description, it doesn’t change the world in a material way. But it does give us permission to see what we love. Let me quote the end of a blurb for a Tinfish Press book of Yang Jian’s poetry (translated by Chun, Roth and Parrish) I just received from David Perry in Shanghai: “So: pay attention. If ever ‘You seem to be living a nightmare,’ take note: ‘Wherever leaves fall, / there is light—‘”